Yoast SEO vs All in One SEO Pack – Choose best WordPress SEO Plugin

According to Builtwith there are 17,666,041 and increasing, live websites using WordPress to run their websites or blogs. WordPress CMS is one of the most popular platforms, which follows web standards with better usability and best for SEO as well.

There are dozens of SEO plugins for WordPress. But, All In One SEO and Yoast SEO are two most popular plugins. Both these plugins are powerhouses in the WordPress SEO scene. So let’s see what these plugins are.

Let’s Get Started With These Plugin’s Intro

All In One SEO Pack and Yoast SEO pack, both these plugins are highly used and all-time favorite by WordPress users.

All In One SEO pack was first developed in 2007. Since then it is most popular WordPress plugin and downloaded 1+ million times. It is developed by Michael Torbert and Steve Mortiboy. All In One SEO is supported for 3.4 or higher versions of WordPress.

Yoast SEO was developed by Joost de Valk in 2010. In the early stage, this plugin was known as WordPress SEO by Yoast. Since 2010, this plugin is quickly becoming another big name in the world Of WordPress SEO and also it is the huge rival of All In One SEO pack. Yoast SEO is supported for 4.3 or higher versions of WordPress.

Both these plugins offer excellent features that the WordPress users need to get optimum SEO benefits for their sites.

But to be frank, most of the WordPress users are confused that which plugin they have to choose between these two powerful plugins. Because both of them are capable of doing just about everything you could want to do with your website or blog SEO.

Want to know that how these plugins are different from each other and which plugin is the best performer? In this article, we have compared All in one SEO and Yoast SEO WordPress plugins and defined our comparison in five different phases.

So, let’s see who wins the title of “Best WordPress SEO Plugin.”

First phase: Settings and Configuration

Installing and setting up these plugins on WordPress is very easy. There is no need for any special skill or practice required to install these plugins on your WordPress websites or blog.

Both All In One SEO and Yoast SEO plugins are installed and activated like any other plugins. After installation, Yoast SEO offers a quick tour to view complete settings and features of the plugin and can get guidance for basic SEO Setup with this plugin.

So let’s see, which plugin performs the best in the phase of installing and setting up basic SEO on WordPress Websites.

Yoast SEO

In Yoast SEO, the setting section itself is perfectly divided into several pages with different tabs that separate all options by category.

In setting section of Yoast SEO, “Help center” option is available on each page, highlighted with a purple colored hyperlink. This help center section has a video tutorial about basic SEO Setup in WordPress website.

Another option in the help center is “Knowledge Search”. Where you can search for a specific setting to understand.

Last one, “Email support”, which is a Yoast SEO Premium feature and only for paid plugins users.

Perfectly organized “Help center” provides the complete information about the plugin, which can help beginners to setup the Yoast SEO Plugin accurately on their WordPress website/blog.

General, Company Info, Webmaster Tools, and Security are other tabs on the main Dashboard of Yoast SEO Plugin.

All In One SEO

The installation of this plugin also goes through the familiar route. Once the installation is finished, you’ll find the new menu item on your WordPress dashboard. Clicking on that new menu, this will take you to the settings’ page.

In contrast to Yoast SEO, All In One SEO plugin has all of its settings on one single page. While this can be a little overwhelming at the first place. But few of All in One SEO plugin users appreciate this, as this is easy and faster for them, just because they don’t have to click through several different pages.

The settings page is divided into several sections, and each sections contains different settings like home page settings, title settings, display settings, Google Settings and lot more.

Click here to View Screenshot of All In One SEO WordPress plugin setting page

Each setting has a help icon, by clicking on that icon, you can have a little description of each setting. And each setting section has help icon at the top right corner of the section. By clicking on that icon, it will open a link in a new tab with a complete documentation of each setting section.

Once you are done with the settings carefully, you are ready to use this All in One SEO plugin for your WordPress website.

Final Result of a First phase: Settings and Configuration

We have seen that both plugins come with lots of options to improve SEO performance of your WordPress website or blog. While the setup can be a bit of an overwhelming. Both these plugins try their best to go easy on you and to help you more to understand each setting option. But personally, in the first phase of plugin comparison, Yoast SEO scores more and win for its well organized, multi-page and tabbed settings.

Second Phase: Content Optimization

Optimization of the content in WordPress website is one of the most important ranking factors in SEO. Each post/page you add to your WordPress website has its SEO score. So let’s see, which plugin performs the best in this second phase of content optimization.

Yoast SEO

When it is the question about content optimization, Yoast SEO offers powerful content analysis tool. That helps WordPress users to optimize each and every post or page on their WordPress website. After installation of this plugin, it adds the meta box to the bottom of the WordPress editor. This meta box comes with a snippet preview, focus keyword field, and content analysis and readability options.

If you want to see that how page/post title looks in search engines, then snippet preview will help you to view the picture of search engine visibility of the post. By default, Yoast SEO uses post title as title and few starting lines as a description. So it is better for you to change it by clicking on the edit snippet button. After that enter your focus keyword in Yoast SEO. With your specified focus keyword, Yoast SEO will analyze your entire content for that specific keyword and will give a score to the post/page content.

Recently, Yoast SEO has added “Readability” tab in this Meta box where you can find the complete analysis of the content regarding readability of the content. This feature of Yoast SEO checks the content for translation word, passive voice, Flesch reading ease, a number of words in between two subheadings, paragraphs length, and words count in the sentences.

All these analyses will help you to improve the technical aspects of your content and Yoast SEO will give you the suggestions to improve your posts for better SEO score.

In the same place of Yoast SEO meta box, you also find two more tabs for social media and advance setting.

Under social media tab, you can add the details about Title, Description, and Image to be added to Facebook and Twitter. By default, Yoast SEO uses Meta Title, Meta Description and Featured image of the post for open graph data of the post. But, while sharing post over Facebook or Twitter, if you wish to use some different title then description or image for the post, you can add details over here.

To view, advanced settings click on the gear icon. At the setting tab, you can have options to manage the permission for search engines about how to access and index the content. You can also add the Canonical URL of the page/post.

All In One SEO

This plugin also comes with a similar meta box that allows editing SEO settings on a post by post basis. You’ll find this All in One SEO meta box to the bottom of WordPress editor.

In contrary to Yoast SEO, this meta box has slightly less functionality. You can only edit the title and description of your post, but you can’t analyze the content of your site or SEO scoring.

These plugins also offer advanced tools for each post on your website or blog to disable indexing, set canonical URLs and more.

There is a feature for social media settings in All in One SEO Plugin. You need to activate this social media addon from All In One SEO → Feature Manager → Click on Social Media Addon to activate the same.

Now, Social Meta tab will be visible under All In One SEO at the sidebar. In this section, you can manage and operate the settings for social media sharing. These settings are majorly for the post title, description, image and open graph data properties.

Click here to View Screenshot of All In One SEO plugin’s Social Meta setting page

Final Result of Second Phase: Content Optimization

Both the plugins have excellent features and functions to manage, operate, and edit content for better search engine visibility. All In One SEO offers additional fields specially for Social Media and if the user wants then he/she can add the data in the setting tab.

And in another hand, Yoast SEO compiles entire content of a website page/post and shares SEO score and content readability score. These features are helpful for the user, with this he/she can edit the content to get the best score.

Advanced features like content analysis, focus keyword, and SEO scoring which takes Yoast SEO to another level. So, also in this second phase, the winner is obviously Yoast SEO pack.

Third Phase: XML Sitemaps

Every content has to index first in a search engine. For that, there is a tool available for you and that is sitemaps. This tool has excellent functionality that tells search engine exactly how to index the content of your site.

Luckily this feature is supported by both these plugins we are comparing.

Yoast SEO

Once the Sitemap functionality is activated, Yoast SEO notifies every time to search engines, when you publish a new content on your WordPress website or blog. This function of Yoast SEO plugin is the quickest way to index your new post in search engines. You can also show up images in Google image searches by indexing your images too.

Yoast SEO also offers an excellent control on XML Sitemap by excluding individual post, categories, author page, tags, and taxonomies. To exclude individual posts you just have to enter the relevant post IDs.

All In One SEO

In All In One SEO, XML Sitemaps are not a standard feature, but you can activate it and enable the XML sitemap Addon. You can enable this addon from Feature Manager Tab.

After activating the XML Sitemap addon, a plugin will automatically create the XML Sitemap. There are plenty of settings for All in One SEO XML Sitemap, you can select the settings you required.

Click here to View Screenshot of All In One SEO plugin’s XML Sitemap setting page

At the starting for XML Sitemap section, you can select the list of search engines Google and Bing to be notified of a new page/post has been published. You can also specify a notification frequency. With the help of this function, you have full control over which post types and taxonomies, and page/post to be excluded from the sitemap.

By scrolling down, you’ll also find priorities and frequencies of the configuration of your homepage, posts, and taxonomies. Yoast SEO plugin does not support this feature. The feature like priorities helps and suggests the search engine how relevant a particular post/page is comparative to other internal pages with values given from 0.0 to 1.0. And the feature of Frequencies helps to change a post/page usually and often each post/page needs to be crawled for updates.

Final Result of Third Phase: XML Sitemaps

Both the plugins have the same feature for XML Sitemaps, but their handling is slightly different. As compared to the Yoast SEO plugin, All In One SEO plugin offers more configuration options. In the third phase of XML Sitemap comparison, All in One SEO plugin wins.

Fourth Phase: Additional SEO Tools and Features

In addition to the standard on page SEO features, both plugins come with other tools and features. Many of the features are there to eliminate the need to install other SEO plugins and offer you a real multifunctional solution.

So let’s see which plugin provide what additional features and tools.

Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO includes a set of functions that covers most elements of on-site optimization. Here is the list of those tools:

Breadcrumb Navigation

Open Graph Meta Tags

Importing Data From Google Webmaster Tools

Built-in robots.txt and .htaccess editor

Import/Export SEO data

All In One SEO

All In One SEO includes many features, but some of the features are not enabled by default. To enable those features, you have to go to the All In One SEO → Feature Manager. Those features are listed below:

Robots.txt

File Editor

Bad Bot Blocker

Open Graph Meta Tags

Import/Export SEO Data

Performance Manager

Final Result of Fourth Phase: Additional SEO Tools and Features

Overall, the list of other features is very similar accept two features breadcrumbs navigation and import data from Google search console which are provided by Yoast SEO. All In One SEO doesn’t support this two features.

Despite, not having these two features wouldn’t affect your WordPress website or blog SEO. But All In One SEO pack gives users more flexibility by allowing them to activate feature only when needed. So here both the contender are equal in this phase, so the result is the tie.

Fifth Phase: Support, Add-ons, and Premium

While the plugins are relatively easy to use and both the plugins have extensive free documentation, there are very limited free support options available for you.

In this last phase, let see what options do these plugins have for support and what are the add-ons and premium features these plugins provide.

Yoast SEO

The basic free version of Yoast SEO plugins has all necessary functionality, but the downside is that it comes without any online support, so you have to use it at your risk. While you can ask questions in the help forum at WordPress.org, but yes team Yoast does not guarantee for an official response, so all you can hope for replies is from other users.

For professional support, the plugin’s premium version comes with on-hand support. But yes for that you have to buy Yoast SEO Premium. The pricing for a single site license starts with $69 and goes up to $799 for up to 100 websites.

Besides support, this premium plugin also comes with several additional features like multiple focus keywords and a redirect manager.

Apart from that, Yoast SEO also offers several paid add-on plugins. Those plugins are available for niche site with specific SEO needs. Here is a list of those addon plugins:

If you want all these plugins, you can also get Yoast SEO Premium and add-ons in a neat bundle for $279, which save money more than $50.

All In One SEO

As like Yoast SEO, All In One SEO pack also offers no support for its free version. Only the Pro version of All In One SEO pack comes with one year of professional supports. That includes features like:

Advanced custom posts type options

WooCommerce products

Category and tag optimization

Robot.txt generator

Front-end editing of .htaccess and robot.txt files

Control of the No Index and No Follow meta tags for individual posts/pages

The Pro version of All In One SEO pack is available for $79 per year for unlimited sites. In addition to that, the pro edition is also usually one version ahead of its free companion.

Final Result of Fifth Phase: Support, Add-ons, and Premium

Both the plugins have the same situation in support feature for its free version. But the user who uses pro version can get the professional help. The license version of Yoast SEO pack is cheaper for only one site and more sites the price goes up. A single license version of All In One SEO pack can be used for unlimited sites.

So overall, All In One SEO pack is clearly the cheaper alternative. So the winner in this phase is All In One SEO pack.

Our conclusion:

Both plugins are excellent and the both these leading WordPress SEO plugins are pretty close in comparison.

However, we found Yoast SEO is the best WordPress SEO plugin, and we prefer this plugin to use it for all our WordPress websites or blog we have. Because this plugin provides more features like importing data from the webmaster tools, breadcrumb navigation, your Info section, social features and more other features. These plugins also have well-organized back-end panel to manage SEO factors.

For the beginners, this plugin provides the best feature, and that is content analysis, and that helps beginners to improve content on their website. With this option, the user can write post titles, descriptions, and use keywords in their content.

Many of the WordPress users use both the plugins on their different websites to get a significant effect on their websites. If they can do it, you also can do this while using one of these excellent WordPress SEO plugins.

Which plugin do you prefer for your website or blog? Is it Yoast SEO or All In One SEO or do you use something entirely different? Share your thoughts here with us.

Dhvanesh is the co-founder of BforBlogging. His area of interest is to investigate WordPress and its hacks more. He writes about WordPress How TOs, best plugins & themes and shortcuts to alter the blogging platform into Money Making Ideas.